HIGHLAND SINGING.
As the boat drew near the land the singing of the reapers on shore was mingled with the song of the rowers. It was frequently noticed by travellers how the Highlanders loved to keep time with their songs to whatever they were doing. Gray heard the masons singing in Erse all day long as they were building the park wall at Glamis Castle.[626] An earlier writer tells how “the women in harvest work keep time by several barbarous tones of the voice; and stoop and rise together as regularly as a rank of soldiers when they ground their arms. They proceed with great alacrity, it being disgraceful for anyone to be out of time with the sickle.”[627] According to Pennant, “in the songs of the rowers the notes are commonly long, the airs solemn and slow, rarely cheerful, it being impossible for the oars to keep a quick time; the words generally have a religious turn, consonant to that of the people.”[628] Ramsay of Ochtertyre says that “the women’s songs are in general very short and plaintive. In travelling through the remote Highlands in harvest, the sound of these little bands on every side has a most pleasing effect on the mind of a stranger.” The custom, we learn from him, was rapidly dying out at the end of last century.[629] I did not myself hear any of this singing in my wanderings; but a Scotch friend tells me that more than forty years ago she remembers seeing a field in which thirty Highland reapers were at work in couples, a man and a woman together, all singing their Gaelic songs.
RAASAY.
Three or four hours’ stout rowing brought the boat to the shore below the Laird of Raasay’s house. “The approach to it,” says Boswell, “was very pleasing. We saw before us a beautiful bay, well defended by a rocky coast; a good family mansion; a fine verdure about it, with a considerable number of trees; and beyond it hills and mountains in gradation of wildness.” At the entrance to the bay is a rocky islet, where we landed, when we visited Raasay on the afternoon of a bright June day. As it was unoccupied, we took formal possession, with a better claim than the European nations have to the well-peopled islands of the Southern Seas. Its name, we learnt from our boatman, was Goat Island, and just as Johnson was addressed as Island Isa, so we were willing to derive our title from our new acquisition. We passed a full half an hour in our domain with great satisfaction. Who, we asked, “would change the rocks of Scotland for the Strand?” The waves beat on our coast, breaking in white crests far away in the open sound. We looked across the little bay on the sunny shore of our nearest neighbour, the Laird of Raasay, and did not envy him the pleasant grassy slope, almost ready for the scythe, which stretched from his mansion to the edge of the sea, or the fine woods which covered the hills at the back of his house. We thought how much the scene is changed since our travellers saw it. Then there was no landing-place; steps had not been even cut in the natural rock. “The crags,” Johnson complained, “were irregularly broken, and a false step would have been very mischievous.” Yet “a few men with pickaxes might have cut an ascent of stairs out of any part of the rock in a week’s time.” There is now a small stone pier. The hayfield, in the memory of people still living, was all heathland down to the water’s edge, with a rough cart-track running across it. Trees have been everywhere planted, and the hill-sides are beautifully wooded. Even before Johnson’s time something had been done in the way of improvement. Martin, in his Description of the Western Isles,[630] mentions “an orchard with several sorts of berries, pot-herbs, &c.” In the copy of Martin’s work in the Bodleian Library, Toland has entered in the margin: “Wonderful in Scotland anywhere.” Boswell mentions “a good garden, plentifully stocked with vegetables, and strawberries, raspberries, currants, &c.” The house—that “neat modern fabric,” which Johnson praises as “the seat of plenty, civility, and cheerfulness”—still remains, but it is almost hidden beneath the great additions which have in later years been made. In a letter to Mrs. Thrale, he says: “It is not large, though we were told in our passage that it had eleven fine rooms, nor magnificently furnished, but our utensils[631] were most commonly silver. We went up into a dining-room about as large as your blue room, where we had something given us to eat, and tea and coffee.” The blue room, less fortunate than its rival at Raasay, has been swept away, with all the beauty and the associations of Streatham Park. I was shown his chamber, with his portrait hanging on the wall. A walking-stick which he had used is treasured up. From his windows he looked down into the garden. However productive it may have been, it was not, I fear, so gay with flowers as it was when I saw it, or so rich in shrubs. I walked between fuchsia hedges that were much higher than my head. One fuchsia bush, or rather tree, which stood apart, covered with its branches a round of sixty feet. Its trunk was as thick as a man’s thigh. The Western Islands are kept free from severe frosts by the waters of the Gulf Stream, so that in the spots which face the southern suns, and are sheltered from the north and east, there is a growth which rivals, and perhaps outdoes, that of Devonshire and Cornwall.
RAASAY.
Not far from the house is the ruined chapel which provoked Johnson’s sarcasm. “It has been,” he writes, “for many years popular to talk of the lazy devotion of the Romish clergy; over the sleepy laziness of men that erected churches we may indulge our superiority with a new triumph, by comparing it with the fervid activity of those who suffer them to fall.” Boswell took a more cheerful view. “There was something comfortable,” he wrote, “in the thought of being so near a piece of consecrated ground.” THE MACLEODS OF RAASAY. Here they looked upon the tombs of the Macleods of Raasay, that ancient family which boasted that “during four hundred years they had not gained or lost a single acre;” which was worthily represented in their host; which lasted for two generations longer, and then sank in ruins amidst the wild follies of a single laird. Whilst rack-renting landlords were driving their people across the wide Atlantic, Macleod of Raasay could boast “that his island had not yet been forsaken by a single inhabitant.” Pleased with all he saw, “Johnson was in fine spirits. ‘This,’ he said, ‘is truly the patriarchal life; this is what we came to find.’” He was delighted with the free and friendly life, the feasting and the dancing, and all “the pleasures of this little Court.” The evening of their arrival, as soon as dinner was finished, “the carpet was taken up, the fiddler of the family came, and a very vigorous and general dance was begun.” According to Boswell, “Johnson was so delighted with this scene, that he said, ‘I know not how we shall get away.’ It entertained me to observe him sitting by, while we danced, sometimes in deep meditation, sometimes smiling complacently, sometimes looking upon Hooke’s Roman History, and sometimes talking a little, amidst the noise of the ball, to Mr. Donald M’Queen, who anxiously gathered knowledge from him.” The same accommodating hospitality was shown here as at Corrichatachin in finding sleeping room for the large party that was assembled. “I had a chamber to myself,” writes Johnson, “which in eleven rooms to forty people was more than my share. How the company and the family were distributed is not easy to tell. Macleod, the chieftain of Dunvegan, and Boswell and I had all single chambers on the first floor. There remained eight rooms only for at least seven-and-thirty lodgers. I suppose they put up temporary beds in the dining-room, where they stowed all the young ladies. There was a room above stairs with six beds, in which they put ten men.” THE PATRIARCHAL LIFE. The patriarchal life was so complete that in this island, with a population estimated at nine hundred,[632] there was neither justice of the peace nor constable. Even in Skye there was but one magistrate, and, so late as forty years ago, but one policeman. Raasay is still without a justice. The people, I was told, settle all their disputes among themselves, and keep clear of crime. Much of the land is still held on the old tribal system. “I have ascertained,” writes Sir Henry Maine, “that the families which formed the village communities only just extinct in the Western Highlands had the lands of the village re-distributed among them by lot at fixed intervals of time.”[633] In Raasay there are little plots of land which every year are still distributed by lot. So small are they, and so close together that it often happens that five or six families are all at the same time getting in their harvest on a strip not much larger than a couple of lawn tennis grounds.
SCOTTISH DANCES.
Boswell with three Highland gentlemen spent one day in exploring the island, and in climbing to the top of Dun Can, or Raasay’s Cap, as sailors called the mountain, to whom far away at sea it was a conspicuous landmark. On the top they danced a Highland reel. If we may trust the statement of a young English tourist, the dance was just as enjoyable, though there were no ladies for partners. “The Scotch,” he writes, “admire the reel for its own merit alone. A Scotchman comes into an assembly room as he would into a field of exercise, dances till he is literally tired, possibly without ever looking at his partner. In most countries the men have a partiality for dancing with a woman: but here I have frequently seen four gentlemen perform one of these reels seemingly with the same pleasure as if they had had the most sprightly girl for a partner. They give you the idea that they could with equal glee cast off round a joint-stool or set to a corner cupboard.”[634] Beyond Dun Can to the north-west the travellers visited the ruins of the old castle, once the residence of the lairds of Raasay. On their return from their walk of four-and-twenty miles over very rugged ground, “we piqued ourselves,” Boswell writes, “at not being outdone at the nightly ball by our less active friends, who had remained at home.”
